The Long Stretch (6 page)

“What really happened to Pa’s head?” I asked Ma.

“What did he tell you?” she asked back.

“Snakes,” I said, smiling. “Two-legged snakes.”

“I suppose you’re old enough to know,” she said.

I don’t remember how old I was.

“It was in the war. There were people called snipers. They sat up in trees. Or high up in church steeples. Or in the upper
windows of houses. And they shot people who were just going about their business.”

“But they couldn’t kill Pa,” I said.

“That they couldn’t,” she said.

“And did Pa get the guy?”

“I’m afraid not,” she said.

A stranger driving the Long Stretch wouldn’t see much. Dense dumb trees jostling in spaces that were once fields. A sodden marsh. Cords of pulpwood stacked, awaiting a trucker’s whim. A few unwelcoming houses.

The sun in winter struggles just above the woods, weakly tinting the grey with a rosy glow and, sometimes, in the evenings, igniting small fires of light in frozen puddles. Summer shines, but only briefly. The Long Stretch is mostly a winter memory.

Belonging to the place you see more.

My father, Jack, and Angus grew up here, closer than brothers. Jack would never say something like “closer than brothers.” He’d say
t’ihck
as t’ieves. “We were
ahll t’ihck
as t’ieves around there.” He’d say it with a little smile. Exaggerating his accent. Because of speaking Gaelic when he was young. Talking Gaelic left them handicapped, Jack used to say. Every time you opened your mouth.
Mouht.

They lasted in Newfoundland about a year after their first flight from home, on the coal boat. Hellish work, Jack said. A bunch of Newfoundlanders digging a hardrock mine with their bare hands practically. Working for nothing, or next to nothing. Soaked and cold all the time. Wet rag over your face to keep the dust out. Working for hope—that this would turn
into something. And it did, later, “after the three stooges left,” Jack said. Turned into a real mine.

They left for Quebec in ‘38. First to Senneterre, then to Bourlamaque, which was great. Close to Val-d’Or. Good times then. Bought an old rattletrap of a car in Amos. Then the war started and they went home to celebrate for a while. Then drove to Sydney to join up. The Cape Breton Highlanders took two of them. Turned Jack down. “Bad wind,” he said, tapping his chest with his big middle finger. “Something they didn’t like in there.”

Romantic fever.

So my father and Angus went to war, and Jack went back to Newfoundland. It was the same as service, they told him. Mining fluorospar in St. Lawrence. Strategic material, for making aluminum. And he joined the militia. Got some kind of uniform at least. But he wasn’t a soldier, he was a miner.

The old man called Jack a zombie once. Drinking at the kitchen table long ago. During the causeway construction, when everybody was around. I barely remember it but I have this image of Jack going over the table after him. Pa, scrambling back, laughing. Grandpa caught Jack halfway and held him. I remember the sound of the table cracking.

The old man could get away with a lot since he was a vet. Wounded in action. People wondering, of course: What kind of action?

Jack worked in St. Lawrence right through the war, his destiny taking root.

Coming back from the war, my father didn’t even have the accent. Talked like from away, at least in my memory. Except when he said “hard.” The
r
would stick in your ear. Lost everything else, it seems.

A car drives by the end of the lane. I instinctively look to the place on the wall where light would reflect when my father would be coming home. There is nothing.

Then the phone rings, like an alarm. We both jump.

“Hello.”

“Hello. Which one of you is this?”

I put my hand over the receiver. “It’s your mother,” I whisper.

No reaction.

To the phone I say: “It’s John. Is this you, Jessie?”

“Let me speak to the other fellow,” she says.

I hear him say “Hello, Mom” like he does it every day. Not like somebody who’s had hardly any contact in thirteen years.

Then a long silence, letting her talk.

There was a huge celebration the day they opened the World’s Deepest Causeway, and the Deepest Ice-Free Harbour on the Atlantic Seaboard. Thousands of people swarmed over Port Hastings. Birth of a new metropolis on the shores of the Canso Strait. HMCS
Quebec,
lolling like a great grey sea serpent, relaxed after its wars, fired lazy shots in salute to the future. Booom-ooom-oom-ooom rolling down the flat black fjord, vanishing behind the point of land where the Swedes would build their big new pulp mill. Bless them. Air full of the fragrance of broiled wieners, and car exhaust. And fiddle music. Always fiddle music. Somebody at school drew a mural, pinned it to the big door between the two schoolrooms, showing skyscrapers. Then all the dignitaries from God-knows-where led a march across the new link, and at the head of the crowd a hundred men in kilts playing bagpipes. You knew you’d never forget it.

Jack was at our place in the evening that day, with Pa and Angus. At the kitchen table. Having a few. Pa behaving now, a special day. Jack had been working at home for nearly two years then. Like hundreds of others, home building the causeway. Driving truck.

“You’ll be away again soon, I expect,” Pa said.

“No,” said Jack. “Going to hang around for a while. See what’s next.”

“The place is going to take off,” Angus said. Angus always sounded sinusy and head-stuffed when he was on the bottle, which was almost always.

Pa scoffed. “We should all go,” he said. “I hear there’s big money to be made in Elliot Lake.”

Jack kind of laughed. “You got her made right here, boy,” he said. “Made in the shade.”

“I’d go quick,” said Pa.

Angus was silent, after making his point. Pulling at the little moustache.

Jack thinking deeply. Making plans.

“Is there another phone?” he asks.

“Up in my bedroom.”

“You mind if I use it,” he says, standing a little unsteadily.

“Go ahead,” I say.

And he heads for the stairs. I take the rum bottle and pour a good shot into the teacup. What the hell. Drinking from the teacup doesn’t seem as dangerous. Not like the old days when I’d be sucking it out of the neck of the bottle.

I’m thinking: They were the days of wrath.
Dies irae.
A song you hear at all the funerals around here. I heard it first at the old man’s. Then after Jack’s I asked Father Duncan, What’s that about?

Days of wrath, he said. And I said, Perfect.

Jack tried to get established here, after the causeway. But there were no jobs for a fellow who’d never gone to school, never served overseas, didn’t know anybody important. Somebody incapable of sucking up. Jack knew he’d have to make his own job.

My father was on the power commission, since shortly after he returned from the war. The Masons and the war vets had all the power commission jobs and the railway jobs. Anything to do with the government. Jack wasn’t a Mason either.

This defines the difference between me and people like Sextus.

People treated me like I was lucky having a father with steady work, home.

People here used to say: Maybe if Jack had been more like his brother. Sandy, my old man. Hard. He’d have been home more. Would have been more of a father to poor Sextus. Only saying this, of course, after Sextus had become a stranger and a bit of a scandal to the place. They’d say: Poor Jack lost control of him early on. Now, you look at Johnny and see the difference. Having a man around.

Here’s the memory. I come home from school with a bruised cheekbone, blood on my sleeve where I wiped my nose.

“What happened?” he wanted to know.

“Nothing,” I said.

He had his hand on the top of my head, turning my face to the light.

“Never mind the snivelling. Just tell me what happened.”

But I can’t.

“Donald Campbell did it,” Effie said.

He didn’t even look in her direction. “Go home,” he said.

She left.

He always wanted me to be somebody other than who I was. Hard, like him.

There’s Donald Campbell jabbing me, goading me on about Effie. Half the school standing around close. Me doing nothing. Standing there, head down, eyes on fire. “Johnny sissy, Johnny sissy,” he shouts, a nickname with the awful potential of sticking to you. Like the one stuck to Hughie the Slut. And Ebenezer Lemonsqueezer. Johnny Sissy. I could be an old man, them calling me that.

Donald is jolting my shoulder with the heel of his hand, not satisfied with the effect of his verbal taunt, but it bounces off, slams into my ear, deafening me for a moment. My hand comes up suddenly, an automatic spasm, more fear than aggression. Grazes his arm, high, close to his face. Provocation. Then the nauseating smack of his fists against my face. Quick thumps. And then the smells in your nostrils. Then the taste, sweet salted blood, snot, and tears.

“I’m telling Sextus and Duncan,” Effie was saying, scrambling along beside me coming home, walking fast to keep up. “They’ll fix him.”

“Don’t tell anybody,” I’m saying, thinking of Pa.

“What happened!”

But how do you explain that to the father who survived a thousand thumps? Delivered thousands more. Shook off a sniper’s bullet, and a whole war. Who could never understand.

The hand went swiftly to my chin, thumb and forefinger rough on the jawbone.

“Come on,” he said, voice quieter. “I don’t care who did it. I just want to know what you did back.”

Eyes locked on mine.

“See,” he said, “you let somebody walk over you once, they never stop. You hear what I say?”

Me nodding against his hand.

“You can get a black eye or a bloody nose. That’s nothing. But you let them get away with it…you never get over that.”

He let go of my face, which tilted instantly to the ground.

Then: “It’s my own fault…I never toughened you up soon enough. What are you now?”

“Nine,” I think I said.

“Here, give me one, hard as you can. Right in the guts. Let me see what you’ve got.”

I couldn’t even lift my gaze from the ground.

I hear his footsteps. Stops in the bathroom. Toilet flush. Now I can hear the creak of floorboards in the living room. He’s exploring.

He calls, “I have a photograph here. The old man’s sawmill. Him in it.”

“I watched him build it,” I say, impatient. Where did he find that?

He shuffles into the kitchen with a photograph in his hand.

“So what about the phone call?” I ask.

“What about it?” he says.

“Like when did Aunt Jessie find out you were around?”

“Well, what’s the difference,” he says. “It just means now I’ll have to go see her tomorrow.” Something evasive in his voice, the averted face.

“Wasn’t that your plan?”

“Well, yes,” he says. “But you never knew how a fellow will feel tomorrow. Anyway. Look at this.”

He drops the photo on the table between us. Black and white. Uncle Jack standing by the big circular saw. Hand on the long lever that controlled the carriage. Him looking like he has the rest of his life under his hand.

“He gambled everything on that old mill. Everything he saved up working on the causeway. Lost his shirt.”

“I don’t want to harp on it,” I say. “But how many people know you’re here?”

“Couple,” he says with a shrug.

“Like?”

“Well. Ma, obviously.”

“And who else?”

“Well,” he says. “Effie knows. That’s the point, eh? Make her sweat. Worrying what we’ll be talking about.”

“So what did you tell Effie you were coming down here for?”

“I told her I wanted to see Ma…maybe you.”

See me.

“She thought that was pretty funny. Said I’d better make sure there aren’t any firearms in the old place.”

I snort. “So you’re on pretty good terms,” I say.

He laughs a long chortling “Noooooho. I wanted to take the kid with me. Sandy. See the place. Let her meet people. Expecially Ma.”

“So?”

“She laughed.”

I couldn’t stay away from the sawmill. I’d head there straight from school. Hang around until near dark. Jack would often drive me home. Running interference. Telling them I’d been helping. Now and then he’d give me some change or a dollar so I could prove that I was really working with him. I watched Jack digging in for the long haul. Not counting on anybody.

I remember Uncle Jack saying that he wanted to get the mill running by winter. The best time for cutting and hauling logs. The earth was frozen. You could get the truck a long way back into the woods. People who lived out there would cut the logs for him and haul them to the woodroads with their horses.

I take the photo from Sextus. I haven’t looked at this stuff for a long time. Not since I culled just about everything with him or Effie in it. A wonderful purge. To look at him now in the photograph, I realize Jack always knew he was living short term. Maybe he got that way working in the mines. Mining exhausts itself. Miners are always moving. Standing beside the big saw, Jack could see the causeway. Once he remarked: Funny looking at something that permanent.

Roadway to a place called the future. A place that only exists if you do.

The old man would stop by the mill occasionally and watch. Even when Jack was setting it up, working alone, except for me
and sometimes Sextus and Duncan. Helping. Setting up cribwork, machinery, his future. The old man would just watch Jack, hands on his hips. Jack would ask him if he’d like to take a turn running the carriage, making a cut on a log. He’d shake his head, kind of laughing. His face would be saying: This project is doomed. He was negative like that.

That didn’t bother Uncle Jack.

Angus showed up, asked Jack if he needed a hand. Jack said sure. Put him down at the end of the carriageway, on the trimmer. He’d take the slabs of wood that were cut away when the log was being squared and chop them into stove lengths. People would pay for them. Jack told him he could have anything they made from selling slabs. But Angus showed up pissed after about a week and almost cut his own hand off. Jack told him to stay away.

Even though Angus MacAskill was a veteran, he never had a steady job after the causeway. Because of the drinking. And he had some deafness, I think. From the big guns. In Italy. They’d be talking about Coriano Ridge. Ortona. I saw a movie about Monte Cassino once. They said Angus would eventually be stone deaf. Duncan wrote about it later.

Ma said it was a shame Angus couldn’t wear a hearing aid. He got one from Veterans Affairs. But he wouldn’t wear it. There was a roar in his head and the hearing aid would make it worse. Eventually the noise inside his head would drown out everything else.

“Angus is bad news,” Jack said once. The worst thing I ever heard him say about anyone.

Jack always made me feel equal, even while wrestling with the logs at one end of the mill. He’d flip them easily, pretending not to notice my struggle. As the winter settled in, the pile of
logs diminished and the piles of lumber and slab grew on the other end. Two-by-fours. Two-by-sixes. Only cutting boards when somebody would come asking for them.

Then Jack would shut down for a day or two, heading back to the woods with the truck, replenishing the pile of logs.

Always working alone, unless he had me with him. My father in the background, waiting, wearing his yellow power commission hardhat. Jack wore a ballcap.